Here she is. This is the cover for Ink & Saltwater, Book Three of the Harbor of Secrets, and I have been sitting on it for longer than was good for me.
The first two books lived on the water. This one lives in a room behind it — a print shop that smells of iron and linseed oil and the accumulated ghost of ten thousand pages. Maren works the press there in the hour before anyone else arrives, because the pre-dawn is the only part of the day that belongs to her, and because what she is really doing in that hour is not printing.
Somebody in Harborstone is manufacturing paper. Not books — debts. Creditor notices for money nobody ever borrowed, attested by people who do not exist, converted quietly into judgments and then into property. It is all perfectly legal-looking, and it is all coming off a press. Maren knows presses. She can tell you which one, from a flaw in a seal too small to see without a glass.
"Going near a name drew a line from her to it, and lines were what she could not afford."
And then there is Cade, who builds ships and has no patience at all for paper, right up until the moment a piece of it arrives claiming his yard. He is the wrong person for her to involve. He notices things. He asks a second question when most men stop at the first. Every hour she spends near him is a line drawn between her name and his, and she has spent three years making sure her name connects to nothing.
It is a slower burn than the first two. Opposites, class tension, a woman working under a cover story she cannot afford to drop, and a man who figures out most of it early and says nothing — which turns out to be the most dangerous kindness in the book.
When can you read it?
Ink & Saltwater releases December 1, 2026. The reader list gets it first — advance copies, release-day reminders, and the occasional note from the desk. If you'd like to be through the door before everyone else, the link is below.
And if you're new to the harbor, start with Book One. Harborstone is a small town and its people have long memories; you'll recognize a face or two in the back of the print shop.
— Remy